Closing a question: tag specificity and the merits of viewing the question in a vacuum

Question

I'm referring to this post I had from earlier: Collocations for litigation.

Judging by the comments, which were helpful, let there be no mistake about that, I appreciate any and all such input.

To get right into it though, I feel this question of mine had a clear scope and the solution space was narrow enough for this community.

I don't dispute I could have clearly written the post itself better (or even the example!), but pragmatically speaking, we had everything we needed:

• Clear identification of problem: unsure of collocations with the word 'litigation'
• Clear answer scope: use 'several' and 'litigation' in some kind of permutation that reads smoothly

Sure, there may be a bit of discretion with what other words to place in there, but given the example sentences in the post, there should be little confusion as to the direction of the sentence. In my mind, an answerer with knowledge on how to use these words together would be able to make short work of this task.

The only grounds I can see for closing it was it does not conform 100% to something like single-word-requests, where I have posted many well-received questions. Nonetheless, I think given that tag wasn't even included, I had no delusions of what my question was after. The collocations tag surely can entertain these trivial bits of latitude, reconciling the usage of 2 words in a small part of a sentence?

To their credit, commenters flagged some overarching problems with my writing. And again, I don't dispute that, but these concerns are besides the point. My understanding of this website has always been, the style/profisionalism of OP was a black box: maybe it's good maybe its bad -- doesn't matter. Our only aim is to zero in on what the question was and humor them -- even if we are opposed to certain elements of the question itself.

Ultimately, if the question has a clear, reasonable scope, perhaps we can just humor OP and answer the question in a vacuum. Then, if we really wanted to, we could flag other issues in the comments and suggest another SE if that should be the case.

I'm just one voice though, I'd be curious to see how others weigh in.

Answer 1

Not every answerable question is a suitable fit for this format.

There’s no objective way to rank all of the possible answers to a “help me write this sentence so it sounds good to me” and those sorts of questions are unlikely to be of much use to more than a few other people.

Single word requests fit this format better if the sense of the word being sought is explained with enough specificity. A word to differentiate “major” and “minor” is something potentially useful to many people, and it is something more easily discoverable through a search.